Way to consolidate several wiki pages to one for prioritization of tasks and topics

Question

Hi,

In our IT unit, we have 3 different teams (technical, config/business and customer support).  The technical and config/business have created several wiki pages that show their work and prioritization of that work that they and other business areas have created.

Is there a way to consolidate several of the wiki pages to one page for our support team?  Also, we would like to have an automated way to prioritize the tasks by date and topics - is this possible?

Thank you!

Lisa Cartier · Answer

Thanks very much, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- .  That is what we are trying to figure out.  Other IT teams are creating the pages (hierarchical by topic types), but for our team, we are more IT generalists and support all efforts, so we have to know how/where and what type of effort our team needs to plug in.  Since the other team setup the pages, I am not sure of the setup related to the 'include' macro.  I will investigate more and like the excerpt-include as we don't need all the details and can go to a different page for that, but at least to have all of the major details in one overview page that we can prioritize and plan our our team's work and resourcing needs would be fabulous!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I'm going to start on the bad point - the Confluence task management is pretty minimal, not much more than "this needs doing / done".  I suspect Atlassian want you to use Trello or Jira if you have requirements more complex.

The good point - oh, yes, consolidation.  It was one of the several things that convinced me that wikis (not just Confluence) should replace most software we use for documents that are large blobs of text (I'd exclude "stories" in the traditional sense of books, scripts, plays etc - word processing still works better for them)

The most simple trick in Confluence is the "include" macro.  You use it to pull one page into another, so you're not copying and if the source page changes, the target page reflects that.

Blatantly clunky example:

I want a page that is pretty much a "wall of text", but covers every computer in my house.  If nothing else, I can hit ctrl-f in the browser to look for key words on a single page.  But I also want to maintain a short page for each system.

In Confluence, I create a page each for systems with names like Aliss, Bob and Charlie.  Then I create a master-page that just says {include:Aliss}{include:Bob}{include:Charlie} - that's my overview automatically, and when I (say) upgrade Bob and update Bob's page to say so, my overview page immediately reflects it.

The next trick is excerpt and excerpt-include.  Slightly more clever and even better for my master-server page.

Let's imagine page "Bob" has a block of stuff that is useful for my master page (name, ip-address, type of computer, what I'm running on it) and then a load of Bob-specific stuff that my master page really doesn't care about.

Wrap the useful bit of Bob in {excerpt), then use {excerpt-include} on the master-page instead of {include}.  Do the same for the others.  The master page is now a block of summaries of pages, not such a wall-of-text.

Those are the neat, and simple, ones built in.  There are a load more - labels, internal links and page properties can be very powerful for navigation and help (rather than consolidation, but linking to related stuff is really good when you're keeping your pages bite-sized instead of consolidating)

There's a lot you can do with a wiki type system that just falls over with document stores.  It's well worth exploring all the macros in Confluence to see what could help!